Joyce Sutphen

Talking, we begin to find the way into our hearts, we who knew no words, words being a rare commodity in those countries we left behind. Both refugees and similarly deprived, we marvel at the many things there are to say: so many variations and colors of the same thought, so many different lengths in the words that line up together on our tongues. No scarcity, no rationing, no waiting in line in order to buy the same answer we heard each time we asked, that one word, owned by the state, manufactured by the state, serving all purposes equally alike: No, No, No, and sometimes Never.

This morning in Dingle, the clouds bellied down over the mountains and broke into grey, white, and blue. Winds flagged through the palm trees that the man from the "Big House" brought back to the bay long ago. Up Greene Street, the school kids in their dark uniforms gather on the sidewalk by the Spar store. Long ago, this was a Spanish town, east of the Blasket Islands and west of Connor Pass. The harbor is full of sails. The piper sits in his little shop on the rounding road, selling penny whistles, telling anyone who will listen how many ways there are to vary the sound, how much there is to think of all at once.

I feel older, younger, both at once. Every time I win, I lose. Every time I count, I forget and must begin again. I must begin again, and again I must begin. Every time I lose, I win and must begin again. Everything I plan must wait, and having to wait has made me old, and the older I get, the more I wait, and everything I’m waiting for has already been planned. I feel sadder, wiser, neither together. Everything is almost true, and almost true is everywhere. I feel sadder, wiser, neither at once. I end in beginning, in ending I find that beginning is the first thing to do. I stop when I start, but my heart keeps on beating, so I must go on starting in spite of the stopping. I must stop my stopping and start to start— I can end at the beginning or begin at the end. I feel older, younger, both at once.

Body is something you need in order to stay on this planet and you only get one. And no matter which one you get, it will not be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful enough, it will not be fast enough, it will not keep on for days at a time, but will pull you down into a sleepy swamp and demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake. Body is a thing you have to carry from one day into the next. Always the same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same skin when you look in the mirror, and the same creaky knee when you get up from the floor and the same wrist under the watchband. The changes you can make are small and costly—better to leave it as it is. Body is a thing that you have to leave eventually. You know that because you have seen others do it, others who were once like you, living inside their pile of bones and flesh, smiling at you, loving you, leaning in the doorway, talking to you for hours and then one day they are gone. No forwarding address.

I will have been walking away: no matter what direction I intended, at that moment, I will have been walking Away into the direction that you now say I have always intended, no matter what my intention was then, I will have been Walking away, though it will not be clear what it was that I was leaving or even why, it seems that you will say That always, I was walking away, intending a direction that was not towards you, but moving away with every step, Or, even when I pretended to be walking towards you, only making the place for my feet to go backwards, Away, where I will have been walking, always away:   intention and direction unknown, but knowing you will always say I will have been walking away.

The image that haunts me is not beautiful. I do not think it will open into a field of wildflowers; I doubt that it will take wing suddenly, startling us into admiration. It is one of those brutish facts of life, the awkward nakedness of the memory when it takes off its clothes and crawls between the top and bottom sheet. Or rather, It is my mother’s memory that I carry, pressed into my own: how at her grandfather’s funeral, his daughter—my mother’s mother— stood at an open door and cried, and then The blood ran down her legs, gushing from the womb where thirteen children had nestled, and now, at once horrified and at ease with her body’s impropriety, they gathered all around. This was the grandmother who lost three of those thirteen, who hung a million baskets of wash, who peeled a million potatoes, and splattered her arms with the grease of constant cooking. This was my grandmother who kept chickens, who left her voice in the throats of all my aunts, and was struck down in the cellar, legs twisted beneath the fall and half her face stiffened. Helpless until they found her, the jar of canned fruit smashed on the cement. And then at her funeral, I saw my mother’s tears, gliding ahead of me in a black limousine, a procession not beautiful but haunting.

My father’s farm is an apple blossomer. He keeps his hills in dandelion carpet and weaves a lane of lilacs between the rose and the jack-in-the-pulpits. His sleek cows ripple in the pastures. The dog and purple iris keep watch at the garden’s end. His farm is rolling thunder, a lightning bolt on the horizon. His crops suck rain from the sky and swallow the smoldering sun. His fields are oceans of heat, where waves of gold beat the burning shore. A red fox pauses under the birch trees, a shadow is in the river’s bend. When the hawk circles the land, my father’s grainfields whirl beneath it. Owls gather together to sing in his woods, and the deer run his golden meadow. My father’s farm is an icicle, a hillside of white powder. He parts the snowy sea, and smooths away the valleys. He cultivates his rows of starlight and drags the crescent moon through dark unfurrowed fields.

It was homemade and primitive, like pulling a tooth with a string and a slamming door, like taking out an appendix by kerosene light where dogs wandered in and out the dirt-floored room. Nothing for the pain that everyone wanted to examine, the twisted heart they thought they could shout back into place. Moaning and fluttering their fleshy hands on the wind, on the wail of the soul possessed, they certified her in a manner Inquisitional, frantic when she held to the grip of darkness, grimly determined to wait the thing out, something learned from movie sheriffs, white hats ghostly in the moonlight. When she would not answer (though they conjured her by heaven and by the all mighty names they knew), they laid hands on her and shouted down the well of her eyes. Many tongues twisted in their mouths when she went, leaving behind only the smallest tooth of wickedness.

It is mid-October. The trees are in their autumnal glory (red, yellow-green, orange) outside the classroom where students take the mid-term, sniffling softly as if identifying lines from Blake or Keats was such sweet sorrow, summoned up in words they never saw before. I am thinking of my parents, of the six decades they’ve been together, of the thirty thousand meals they’ve eaten in the kitchen, of the more than twenty thousand nights they’ve slept under the same roof. I am wondering who could have fashioned the test that would have predicted this success? Who could have known?

What am I to you now that you are no longer what you used to be to me? Who are we to each other now that there is no us, now that what we once were is divided into me and you who are not one but two separate and unrelated persons except for that ex- that goes in front of the words that used to mean me, used to mean you, words we rarely used (husband, wife) as when we once posed (so young and helpless) with our hands (yours, mine) clasped on the knife that was sinking into the tall white cake. All that sweetness, the layers of one thing and then another, and then one thing again.